Discovering Hidden Knowledge - Chris Young (#035)

This talk takes the form of a dialogue between a Manager, new to a company, and Senior members of the team the manager joined.

The manager thought he was doing ‘the right thing’ - visualising the work, using this to identify bottlenecks, moving people to the bottleneck to alleviate it.

In doing so he didn’t see that he was treading on the toes of the people who had got the work to where it was in the first place.

This lead to a crisis meeting which brought the whole team together to talk about hitherto unspoken, hidden, problems and agree a way forward.

The talk will draw on the direct experience of the speakers to reflect on the difficulties encountered, how they were overcome, what was learned, and how the whole team went on to work better
together.

We will talk about:

- How to look beyond your models, both mental and visual to see what’s really happening
- Getting buy in by making a collective model
- Role Confusion, how to spot it and how to stop it.
- How this confusion affects both individuals in Cross Functional Teams and the way teams work together.
- How visualisations of the work identified Goal Confusion and how we addressed that.
- How Goals of individuals play along side the Goals of the Work
- How we use queue length as a trigger for intervention and direction.
- Applying Batch Size and Transactional Cost to Communications between individuals and teams

We will share artefacts and data from our work, Story Maps, Impact Maps, Cumulative Flow Diagrams, Kanban Boards and so on.

More importantly, we will share our experience, the highs, the lows and the in betweens which we hope will resonate with the audience and help them in their work.

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